Westchester, NY (April 13, 2016)—Alchemy Post Sound in New York provided Foley services for The Bandit, which made its world premiere to glowing reviews at this year’s SXSW Film Festival.

The Bandit is a documentary by director Jesse Moss about Burt Reynolds, the late director and stuntman Hal Needham and the making of the iconic 1977 action-comedy, Smokey and the Bandit. Working under the direction of supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer Tom Paul, Foley artist Leslie Bloome and his crew recreated the sounds of brawling stuntmen, a rocket-propelled car and 100-foot body falls to accompany the film’s stunts and action scenes.

Alchemy has collaborated with Paul on previous projects, including Cartel Land, Weiner and The E-Team. “Every time I book Leslie and his team on a show, I breathe a sigh of relief, because I know I’ve secured a solid element for my mix,” Paul says. “If my next thought about Foley is to push the fader up at the mix, I can trust that it will be just right. They are truly a well-oiled and very experienced machine.”

For most documentaries, Bloome aims to make the Foley effects as realistic as possible, and subtle enough to blend seamlessly with production sound. The subject matter of The Bandit, however, cried out for a bit more creative license. “It’s a story about stuntmen,” notes Bloome. “It ought to sound bigger than life. There are moments where stuntmen are taking brutal hits and we thought, let’s make them a little harder than they would have been in real life. When stuntmen are flying through windows, it should sound painful. When a guy jumps off a building aiming for a horse…and misses, it’s got to hurt. We took it a little over the top.”

Not all of the Foley work was quite so raucous. “Creating perspective is a big part of our job,” he says. “It’s about understanding mic placement and, on the engineering side, understanding how to blend mics.”